


May All The Stars Hang Bright Above Her

by splash_the_cat



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Biting, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fluff, Making Out, Sleepy Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 11:31:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6904108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/splash_the_cat/pseuds/splash_the_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are three things Caine Wise knows: the gyre is a cold place that cares for no one, he can only count on himself, and Jupiter Jones is going to change all of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	May All The Stars Hang Bright Above Her

**Author's Note:**

> I needed something relatively mindless and fluffy to write while I was wrangling 400 events and the 270 people involved in them. Yay, con program scheduling. And then I realized halfway through this I was pretty much writing fic about a scene I'd written in another fic.

_May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,_  
Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth!  
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode, 4 April 1802

Awareness returned in a haze of softness, warmth and Jupiter as something tickled his cheek. Caine blinked his eyes open to find his face buried in her hair. He breathed deep, suddenly greedy for the scent of her - just her, devoid of fear and rage and pain. It made no sense that a simple mix of chemical signals and pheromones left him almost dizzy with elation and a need, a _hunger_ for more, but he breathed her in again and again and again.

Habit shortly pulled him from his bliss and he lifted his head to scan the compact Aegis stateroom. Lit only by the reflected shine of Earth through the window, it was quiet and still. His implant told him he'd been asleep for five hours, and no one had clicked him since he'd followed Jupiter here from the Aegis medbay, where she'd hovered nearby, looking faintly green as the medsynth had put his shoulder back together and knit his broken ribs with a few ReGen injections.

Caine had intended to do nothing more than keep watch after she'd fallen into the bed, almost asleep as she hit the mattress, but exhaustion dragged at him, and he'd stood beside the bed, suddenly unsure. When Jupiter peered up at him and murmured his name, reaching out to him, he had opened his mouth to inform her of his plan, but nothing came out. Instead, he'd stripped off the bloodied, ruined shirt and removed his boots and his belt and mauler and taken her hand, allowing her to draw him down beside her. He'd stuffed down his immediate thought to roll to the far side, instead following a deeper instinct; he'd curled around her, buried his face in her hair, and sank into the oblivion of sleep.

Jupiter breathed deep and slow; she slept on, her body lax in his arms, the shadows hiding the bruise he knew was smeared across her cheekbone. Caine dropped his head back to the pillow and nuzzled into the spot just behind her ear that he'd stared at so many times over the last few days, wanting to do just that; he dug a fingernail into the thin skin of his wrist to make sure he wasn't dreaming this, wasn't dreaming any of the last few wild days.

Even as his skin stung sharp and bright and her pulse sang a quiet reassurance against his lips, years of training and a well-honed sense of suspicious self-preservation spun up in the back of Caine's mind: what would happen next, what is she going to do, what will she expect of him, what will she _want_ of him... would she even want him beyond these moments? He built and discarded plans for the future, weighing tactical advantages and changing landscapes of the next hour, day, week, month, unease roiling his guts at the lack of intel that would allow him to make any real decisions.

But another, deeper part of him had clearly already decided that he was right where he belonged and really wanted to go back to sleep and worry about the details later. Caine wavered between habit and need, but the soft warmth of Jupiter's body and the crisp, pleasant scent of her skin settled his worries into a faint, formless uncertainty, and with a sigh he gave the room one last appraising scan, before curling around her once and giving in to the lure of silence and peace.

Another three hours had passed when he woke again. Nothing had changed: no one had clicked him, the room was still secure, and so he buried his nose back into Jupiter's hair and-

"Are you smelling my hair?"

Caine jerked away as Jupiter rolled over to face him. "Hey," she said, cupping his cheek. Her fingers trailed along his jaw, under his chin, and he followed the gentle pressure back down to the pillow. "It's okay. Though I should probably apologize. I must smell terrible."

"No, you smell great," he said automatically. When he saw how that brightened the shadows around her eyes, he ducked his head into the curve of her neck and breathed deep. "Really great." She tensed, but her scent showed no unease. Instead, he caught the hints of how she smelled the first time they were in this room or that moment in the Commonwealth...

Desire and anticipation and affection.

"Caine," Jupiter whispered, and his heartbeat thrumming with nervous excitement, Caine nuzzled into the hollow of her throat. When she tilted her head, he pressed a kiss to her rising pulse and then his teeth to her soft skin, just for a moment.

"Oh my God," she said as he kissed her again where he'd bitten her. The faint marks he'd left would be gone in a few minutes; he wondered if she'd let him mark her more someday. She smelled like she might - the spike of arousal that washed over him when he'd set his teeth to her made him dizzy.

Her fingers wound into his hair and Jupiter dragged his mouth to hers. This kiss was languid, without the rush of fear and resignation that had driven the last one, and Caine sank into it, savoring the unhurried, gentle sweetness of her mouth, the bloom of promise and satisfaction in her scent. Laying with her in the soft darkness, limbs tangled, breathing in her very breath, her hands so warm and soft against his scarred skin, it was so easy to think they were they only two people in the universe.

Caine chased her mouth when she finally pulled away to catch her breath and nipped her bottom lip before soothing it with his tongue. "Back on Orous," he said, bolstered by the dim light, her encouraging smell and the soothing scratch of her fingernails on the back of his neck, "I really, really wanted to bite you."

"Duh." Her small smile held no acrimony, but it twisted awkwardly after, and her eyes dropped to stare at his chin. "So what next? I mean, you and Stinger have your pardons, now." Jupiter spoke as if it were a casual question, but he caught a thread of anxiety in her scent, a tiny burst of dopamine as her fingers tapped against his collarbone. Her nonchalance was, he realized, a facade.

"I want my wings back, yes," Caine said, slowly, gingerly working his way around to whatever might be the source of her sudden apprehension. "And to clear my record."

Jupiter stared harder at his chin, her fingers now still. "Does that mean you'll need to go back to the Legion?"

As he'd said when he lied to her in the Commonwealth, lied right to her face even as she held her heart out to him.

"I mean," she continued, cortisol now coiling with the dopamine. "You're free, and you can be a Skyjacker again, and I get it, this has been weird and God, it's been like what three days, if even that? That's not much time, and you don't really know me and I don't really know anything about you, and you don't like Entitled and you must have so much you want to do now that you're free..."

Caine wasn't sure how to explain to her that he wasn't free, not really, or that he didn't care that he barely knew her, that he knew enough, enough to so desperately want more, so instead he said, "Even if the Legion re-options my contract, you are, as you point out, Entitled. You may request anyone you wish from the Legion for your royal guard appointment."

Jupiter winced. "That's not quite what I was thinking of, with all this. I don't want you to work for me. I want..."

Want. Such a strange thing, to want something so much and have it before him, offered freely. The man he'd been just days before would have thought this not a boon, but a trap. That broken empty man, though, had died when he cast himself in the deep red swirls of an unending storm for this astonishing woman who wanted _him_ for himself and nothing more.

Tipping her chin up, Caine bit along the line of Jupiter's jaw to her mouth and kissed her. "I want, too," he said against her lips before he kissed her again, and once more after that.

"How can you be so sure?" she said against his mouth, wry and hushed, but she splayed her hand against his chest, over his heart, and he laid his hand over hers, holding it to him tight.

"Tell me that I'm wrong."

Jupiter shook her head, though he didn't know if she was answering or denying his echoed challenge. "Why did you lie?"

Such a simple question, but one that sent his words spiraling away like scattered leaves in a hard gust of wind. He wanted to duck his head back into the crook of her neck, but after everything, after he'd seen how his words had cut through her in those terrible moments in the Commonwealth, before everything got so much worse, he owed her this, no matter that it terrified him: "I've... no one has ever... not like you. It was easier, not to hope that what you offered was possible."

She pulled her hand from under his and turning his over, pressed a kiss to the center of his palm before she wound her fingers through his. "And now?"

Now... "I want. I want to see what will happen. With us."

"Good answer," she said, and she smelled, oh blood and bone she smelled so - he tipped her chin up again, and gently bit her throat again, because he could, because she wanted, and he _wanted_...

Jupiter dragged her thumb along his bottom lip before she took his mouth in a warm, slow, sweet kiss that only ended when her jaw cracked wide in a yawn. She clapped her hand over her mouth as it happened again, and then she laughed, cheeks flushed. "So, would you be insulted if, after all that, I also kind of want to go back to sleep?"

Caine laughed too, a rough, half-remembered sound that startled them both. "No. I think we both need that."

"Thank God, because I probably would have fallen asleep on you mid-kiss and that would have been even more embarrassing." Jupiter snuggled against him as he smoothed her hair from her face and pressed his nose behind her ear. "Sweet dreams," she mumbled around another jaw-cracking yawn, already mostly slipped back into slumber.

"No more dreams," Caine murmured against her skin as he eased his arms around her and let himself be lulled into that hazy, still space on the edge of sleep by the soothing beat of her heart, the slowing, steady pattern of her breath, the heady, inexplicable _rightness_ of her scent. "I have you."


End file.
